Bill de Blasio, Friend of Real-Estate Developers?

In 2009, Bill de Blasio, then a Brooklyn city councilman eyeing citywide office, was asked whether he would support a real-estate development of about four hundred and fifty apartments and condos along the polluted Gowanus Canal in his district.

The plan faced steep opposition. Neighbors didn’t want twelve-story residential towers nearby. Environmental activists said that the water was too contaminated to have people living near it. Turn-of-the-century gas and chemical plants, mills, and tanneries had dumped sewage and industrial pollutants in the canal for decades. A ten-foot-tall layer of toxins, referred to by cleanup workers as “black mayonnaise,” rests at the bottom of the canal.

But de Blasio saw an opportunity. The developer, David Von Spreckelsen, president of Toll Brothers City Living, the homebuilder’s greater New York City division, told me that de Blasio was the “key person to the project’s success—and he was with us all the way.”

To that end, de Blasio had two key concessions he wanted, the developer recalls: organized labor would handle the construction and twenty per cent of the project needed be slated for affordable housing. The parties agreed easily on the affordable-housing requirement, but were far apart on the use of union workers.

“We indicated this is very atypical for a Brooklyn residential project and that it would put us at a competitive disadvantage,” Von Spreckelsen said. “He told us to meet with certain trades and some of them we came to an agreement with and a number of them, we didn’t. But Bill said, ‘I trust you. You guys have always done what you said and I will take what I can get.’”

Before the towers could be built, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency swooped in and declared the Gowanus Canal a federal Superfund cleanup site. De Blasio stuck by the plan, but the whole thing was eventually scuttled in 2010. The cleanup is expected to cost upwards of five hundred million dollars, and last into 2020.

But de Blasio’s support paid off for the future mayoral candidate in other ways; Von Spreckelsen hosted a fundraiser for de Blasio at his Wall Street office in March, after getting a call from a fellow real-estate developer and de Blasio supporter.

“He’s been running a fairly liberal campaign to distinguish himself from [New York City Council Speaker Christine] Quinn, but Bill is very smart and practical,” Von Spreckelsen said. “He’s pro-development and pro-affordable housing, and I don’t think he should be feared by the business community.”

On Tuesday, de Blasio, New York City’s liberal public advocate, rode a wave of voter apathy with the crowded Democratic field to finish first in the primary (and possibly avoid a runoff ahead of the general election). His liberal rhetoric—and politics—won him several big-name endorsements, including from a host of celebrities and academics. And it made him an appealing counterpoint to a key rival, Quinn, who many voters still criticize for supporting the repeal of term limits so that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, her ally, could run for a third term, in 2008.

On the campaign trail, de Blasio has decried New York City as being split between the haves and the have-nots. At a recent stop, he accused the Bloomberg administration of neglecting the city’s widening income gap, and making “that divide even more severe.” His most headline-grabbing proposal thus far has been a tax-the-rich plan on wealthy New Yorkers who make more than five hundred thousand dollars per year. In July, he got himself arrested for disorderly conduct at a raucous protest outside the office of the chancellor of the State University of New York, near Bryant Park. (He was protesting the planned closure of a hospital owned by SUNY.) The arrest was de Blasio’s fourth, by his own count, dating back to his past life as an activist, when he protested on Latin American issues with a group called Quest for Peace.

Shortly after he was released from a Manhattan police precinct, I asked de Blasio how the arrest related to his then-fledgling mayoral campaign. It hadn’t been a gimmick, he told me: “No one wants to be arrested.” Rather, he said, he wanted to help draw the attention of Bloomberg and other elected officials to the planned hospital closure.

Bloomberg has staked much of his legacy on ambitious development projects—rezoning a quarter of the city, preserving and expanding parks and historic sites at a record-setting rate, and reshaping large swaths of New York City. It’s unlikely that de Blasio, who would be the city’s first Democratic mayor in more than two decades, would be willing or able to match that record. But despite his firebrand reputation, de Blasio’s real-estate track record suggests that he might not be as different from Bloomberg as people expect, at least when it comes to development.

Rafael Cestero, who served as Bloomberg’s housing commissioner from 2009 to 2011 and now runs the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve affordable housing, said that he sees a lot of similarities between de Blasio and Bloomberg when it comes to development, even if details on specific proposals have been scarce on the campaign trail. (Bloomberg, he said, was almost always “on the progressive end” of economic-development and housing issues.) “We’ve got a good thing going,” he said. “The city is growing, people aren’t leaving. And Bill is a pragmatic progressive. I wouldn’t expect that much of a difference.”

A hint of de Blasio’s pro-business stance can be found in a telling speech on economic development that he gave in late July at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. In the fifty-minute address, de Blasio presented his four-point plan to spur job growth and increase the city’s affordable-housing stock. His first bullet point: maximizing development.

He referred to the Gowanus Canal project with Toll Brothers and two other controversial construction projects in Brooklyn he supported, at Atlantic Yards and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

In 2006, he backed the massive Atlantic Yards project, which used eminent domain to build the nineteen-thousand-seat Barclays Center in Prospect Heights. The developer, Bruce Ratner, promised affordable housing but has yet to build it. At Brooklyn Bridge Park, he pushed for luxury housing, despite objections from neighborhood advocacy groups that said the condos would create an affluent and insulated community in one of the Brooklyn waterfront’s prime public spaces.

“We can’t afford a process rife with delays, subject to knee-jerk NIMBYism and tangled in bureaucracy,” de Blasio told the students, sounding not all that different from the man he was trying to replace.